Intel introduced its new "Tulsa" Xeon chip for high-end x86 servers on Tuesday, the latest of several moves to reclaim turf lost to AMD.
The new dual-core chip, designed for four-processor systems and officially called the Xeon 7100 series, has a price ranging from $856 (£450) for a 7110 model with 4MB of high-speed cache memory and a 2.6GHz clock speed to $1,980 for a 7140 model with 16MB of cache and 3.4GHz speed.
Last week, Intel said Tulsa boosts performance by about 70 percent compared with its predecessor, Paxville, but now the chipmaker is trying to steer attention toward a comparison with AMD's Opteron. Tulsa systems are 17 percent faster than Opteron machines on business database tasks and 42 percent faster on Java server tasks, Intel said.
AMD entered the x86 server market three years ago, and the competition has been fierce since. All four major server makers sell or will sell Opteron servers, and AMD has risen to claim 26 percent of the server processor market. Intel is fighting back with its "Woodcrest" Xeon for dual-processor servers and now with Tulsa for higher-end models.
"The 7100 really brings us up back to where want to be in terms of maximum performance," said Tom Kilroy, general manager of Intel's Digital Enterprise Group.
Tulsa is the last model to use Intel's all-but-extinct NetBurst architecture, which Kilroy acknowledged is "long in the tooth". But Tulsa is still a compelling design, he argued. "The 16MB of L3 (level-three) cache really helps position it for superior performance."
Cache is kingIndeed, cache is at the heart of the AMD-Intel rivalry. AMD's Opteron includes a built-in memory controller, while Intel systems require a separate chip that takes longer to fetch data. But including a large cache means that data is more likely to be readily at hand, so the memory controller isn't needed at all, Intel argues....
